Well, apparently Tom Friedman got quite a lot of response to the column I posted about the other day and the New York Times has published a selection of the comments. If this comment:

Why is it the left’s job to keep in step with the status quo in order to unite the party?

is at all typical it highlights that they just don’t get it. “The left” is, perhaps, an eighth of voters. Far, far more are center-left, moderates, or conservatives. In particular blacks, necessary for Democrats to win elections, are far more conservative than a lot of people seem to believe. Whatever Republicans may think “Democrat” is not synonymous with “the left”.

For “the left” to get even a little of what it wants, they must persuade people not bludgeon (literally) them. I do not believe that in the age of smartphones and the Internet any Democratic presidential candidate, having raised their hand in favor of open borders, will be able to dash back to a more centrist position.

The question that Democrats should be asking is if Barack Obama had staked out the positions in 2008 that he eventually had taken by the end of his presidency, would he have been elected for a first term? I think the answer is “no”.

Historically, the candidate who expresses the most optimistic view of America, its people, and its future has won in the general election and that includes Trump. Maybe it will be different this time but, as Cicero said more than two millennia ago, to be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child. It’s even worse to think that this time will be different just because you’re around.

Running against two-thirds (or more) of the voters will not be a winning strategy for anybody.

At Vox.com Jared Bernstein has a post on four economic theories that have fallen on hard times that I think is worthy of your consideration. The theories are:

1. Going below the natural rate of unemployment could spark an inflationary spiral
2. Everybody wins with globalization
3. Deep budget deficits will crowd out private investment
4. A higher minimum wage will only hurt workers

The first is the well-known “Phillips Curve”, proposed in 1958 and taught as gospel when I was taking economics classes. Although it seemed to be predictive from the post-war period through the early 1970s, the relationship bwtween unemployment and inflation seems to have stopped working. Milton Friedman thought it only applied over the short run. No one really knows whether that was the case, it was just a fluke, or if circumstances have changed so that it no longer applies. I suspect there’s some relation between sluggish increases in productivity and unemployment which explains why the relationship between inflation and unemployment no longer seems to hold.

The second is the neoliberal theory of international trade that has guided our trade policy for decades. I think that it remains true all other things being equal but that is also possible for a country, particularly a very large country, through careful application of mercantilist policies to arrange for itself to gain while everyone else loses and that the authorities of an unnamed country have succeeded in doing just that.

The third theory that doesn’t seem to be holding true is “crowding out” and it depends on whether credit is a scarce commodity or not. IMO it is possible that there are multiple carrying capacities for credit—personal, local, national, regional, global—and that while the theory may not be working as expected today it may well tomorrow. Feel lucky, punk?

I would never claim that a higher minimum wage only hurts workers and never helps them. I think that I would say that whether it helps, hurts, or both depends on, among other things, the price elasticity of labor. I also think that treating human beings as though they were cogs in a machine is immoral. Helping some workers while throwing others permanently out of work is simply not the right thing to do, particularly when there are other alternatives.

At any rate you may find Mr. Bernstein’s post as interesting as I did. In particular check out the section on the wage effects of loose and tight labor markets.

Perhaps I am being unkind but over the last several years I have seen “artificial intelligence” waved in front of a myriad of questions like a magic talisman. Given my interest in languages, naturally my interest was piqued when I ran across this article at Discovery Magazine on using artificial intelligence to decipher writing that is presently undecipherable. The punch line is here:

Taking on ancient languages with AI does pose some unique problems, though. Machine learning algorithms are usually trained on massive datasets that they mine in order to learn through associations. Most ancient scripts have only a limited number of samples, making it difficult to feed an algorithm enough data for it to learn.

The process of training an algorithm also involves comparing its answers to known values. When a language is entirely undeciphered, however, this is impossible. You can’t tell an algorithm “Yes, that is a bike,” or “No, that word does not mean ‘stop’” if you don’t know what any of it means.

or, said another way, it isn’t particularly helpful. The problem with proto-Elamite, for example, is that it may be what’s called a “language isolate”, a language like Basque with no known related languages. The orthography is likely to be imperfect which makes it quite difficult to identify cognates. The number of samples is rather limited. Much the same is true of the writings of the Indus civilization. We’re not even 100% certain that they’re writings.

By comparison deciphering the Mayan glyphs, something I consider one of the great achievements in translation of the 20th century, was relatively easy. The hardest part was recognizing that they were writings.

However, there’s always hope.

I found this article by Christopher Sims at Modern War Institute very thought-provoking. For example, there’s this:

Given that the average age for enlistment into the United States Army is twenty and the average age of deployed personnel is thirty-three, digital natives are now the primary demographic cohort that will be charged with training for and fighting wars on behalf of the nation-state.

What that tells us is that the U. S. military is making an historic transition in age cohorts. Due to the mandatory retirement age, there is necessarily a transition from the Baby Boomers who have led our military for some time to members of the Generation X cohort. I do not know what the implications of that may be.

I find the author’s use of the word “nation-state” problematic. My understanding is that a nation-state is a country in which ethnicity and citizenship are identical. Hungary is a nation-state. The United States is not and never has been. China is presently a multi-ethnic empire that, apparently, aspires to be a nation-state. Russia is not.

I’m also not sure what he means by “legitimacy”:

Many challenges digital natives face will diminish the legitimacy of the state.

I don’t think he means “legitimacy”. I think he means authenticity. I do not know what the background of the author is but he sounds like a Brit. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland isn’t a nation-state, either, as any Scot or Welshman would tell you. Any crisis of legitimacy it faces is more due to the disdain the elected leaders there rather obviously have for the people who elected them than to a generational shift from non-“digital natives” to “digital natives”.

He certainly succeeds in shaking any confidence I had in the fundamental competence of “digital natives”. Isn’t the lesson of the example he cites that being highly connected may also render you irrationally apprehensive?

Read the whole thing.

At the Financial Times Martin Wolf makes a hoarse-throated argument in favor of globalization:

Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto.” (I am a human being. I consider nothing human foreign to me.) These words by Terence, a second century BC Roman playwright, make a noble motto for our time. They define a position condemned by many, including the president of the US, as “globalism”. Yet that should mean more than economic — or, as some call it, “neoliberal” — globalisation. It should mean that humanity has global obligations and interests. To meet the former and promote the latter, the nation state is the start. But we must also think and act far beyond it.

I agree with that as far as it goes. Now reconcile that with China’s actions.

• China has never lived up to the commitments it made in joining the World Trade Organization.
• Its banks are opaque and largely organs of the state.
• Its currency remains nonconvertible.
• A very large proportion of its economy remains state-owned and is subsidized by the Chinese state.
• It has an active program of industrial and military espionage against the U. S. and, presumably, other countries.
• It routinely violates the intellectual property rights of foreign companies.
• Its imports are declining much faster than its exports, marking a return to a sort of one-way autarky.
• Its lack of a robust system of civil law makes it impossible for foreign companies to seek remedies in its courts.
• As I have documented it violates trade agreements more than any country other than Russia, even when taking the volume of its trade into account.
• It is using strongarm tactics to seize control of the South China Sea.
• It is a scofflaw on the UNCLOS. Example: a Chinese trawler rammed and sank a Filipino fishing boat. The trawler did not offer assistance to the survivors in contravention of international law. The captain of the trawler was not disciplined by the Chinese government as is required under international law.
• China supports the most reprehensible regimes on the planet, e.g. North Korea.
• China is polluting the environment at a ferocious rate, faster than any other country by far.
• China is essentially a free rider on the peaceful global system maintained by the U. S.

Is globalization possible without China? Is it possible with the China described above?

1. Never date Winona Ryder.
2. Father figures always die.
3. Shopping malls are extremely exciting places to work.
4. The Russian military can come and go in Indiana without being noticed.
5. People in small towns have very short memories.
6. Christmas tree lights have a lot of uses.
7. Don’t sweat the petty stuff and don’t pet the sweaty stuff.

I have not written about l’affaire Epstein and I do not intend to but, speaking of denial, if you believe that he has been getting the legal deals he has been getting for the last 20 years out of a spirit of bonhomie, you are not merely in denial but in a state of fugue. The only credible explanation I can come up with is that he has something on somebody. Maybe a lot of somebodies. Alexander Acosta is not the last notable on whom the mud will land.

Here’s your quiz for the day. Who is being shielded by the blanket non-prosecute deals (I suspect their legality is in serious question) in the Epstein matter?

1. Alexander Acosta
2. Bill and Hillary Clinton
3. the entire upper echelon of Clintonistas (which means the DNC)
4. Donald Trump (same social circle as Epstein)
5. George W. Bush (it was during his presidency that most of these deals were forged)
6. Alberto Gonzales (he was Attorney General when the deals were cut)
7. Robert Mueller (he was head of the FBI when the deals were cut)
8. Whoever was U. S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida in 2007
9. Barack Obama (he was president when the matter re-emerged in 2011)
10. Eric Holder
11. It goes a lot deeper than that
12. Aw, they just cut deals like that for anybody with money. Or who they think has money.

My guess is that 1) the attempts to tar Trump with this particular brush are pretty feeble; 2) the Clintons’ reputation will be even more damaged if such a thing be possible; 3) the revelations have barely begun; 4) it could be all of the above; and 5) we may never know.

The key theme of the day seems to be denial, as in psychological denial. Devoted Clintonista Rahm Emanuel is in denial that the political party to which he has devoted much of his life is leaving him behind. Progressives are in denial that the more they cry “Racism!” the less effect it has. Inflammatory charges cannot be the basis of your diet. They are more like seasoning. Too much and the whole dish become inedible. The editors of the Washington Post are in denial that Turkey has become Islamist rather than secular Kemalist and an Islamist Turkey cannot be our ally.

Today I’ve also seen denial that there is no demonstrable relation between nominal personal income tax rates and income inequality. Effective tax rates may be another story.

People say that I’m in denial because I don’t leave Chicago/Illinois. I understand the problems and the risks well. I have nowhere else to go. It is where my job is and I am not rich enough to live anything but a hardscrabble life without my job.

All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore all men are Socrates.

That wild flight of illogic is from Woody Allen’s Love and Death. It resembles a fallacy of irrelevance called “the genetic fallacy”. The genetic fallacy has nothing to do with DNA but with determining whether something is true or false based on the history of the claim or its source. Those are irrelevant to whether a claim is true or false.

David Leonhardt opens his latest New York Tmes column wth an evocation of the genetic fallacy with respect to immigration policy:

The history of American opposition to immigration is to a large extent a history of racism, which was often promoted by powerful or influential people.

Calvin Coolidge wrote in 1921 that “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend.” Henry Cabot Lodge warned, in an 1896 speech on the Senate floor, that immigrants could devastate the “mental and moral qualities which make what we call our race” — and Theodore Roosevelt praised Lodge for “an A-1 speech.” Roosevelt also told a friend he was worried about the “multiplication” of “Finnegans, Hooligans, Antonios, Mandelbaums and Rabinskis.”

Given that history he is struggling with his own, accurate perception that circumstances have changed:

As regular readers know, I have become somewhat hawkish on immigration. I think our immigration policy should take into account the sharp rise in inequality over the last few decades. One way to do so would be to reduce, or at least hold constant, the level of immigration by people who would compete for lower- and middle-wage jobs while increasing immigration among people who would compete for higher-wage jobs.

History also makes this point. It’s not just a coincidence that the period of strongest income gains for middle-class and poor families — starting in the 1940s — followed, and overlapped with, a period of falling immigration. “Immigration restriction, by making unskilled labor more scarce, tended to shore up wage rates,” the great labor historian Irving Bernstein wrote.

The economists Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson have noted that the foreign-born share of the labor force fell to 5 percent in 1970, from 21 percent in 1915. Countries with “slower labor force growth” in the middle of 20th century, they note, “experienced deeper income inequality reductions.”

Since the 1970s, of course, immigration has surged, as has income inequality. Many other factors play a role in rising inequality: corporate consolidation, slowing educational attainment, the decline of unions, falling tax rates on the rich and more. Some of these are substantially more important than immigration. But immigration belongs on the list.

In particular he struggles with what he considers Trump’s racism and Trump’s support for immigration laws based on skills rather than on family ties, sponsorship, or a lottery as our present system is. Whatever you think of Trump that is fallacious. You cannot evaluate the wisdom of a policy by assessing the motives of those who support it.

The sad reality is that in today’s political climate the only people who will propose the immigration reforms we need are those who don’t care that they will be called racists which means that some of them will be racists. Mr. Leonhardt’s search for a political leader who will “figure out how to make a principled case for less immigration” will be in vain because such any such figure will inevitably be called a racist whether it’s true or not.

When identifying solutions to problems you must consider the things that you can control, those you cannot control, and those for which the cost of the solution you are considering is not justified by the results you can hope to achieve. I think that income inequality and, in particular, that so many black Americans, the descendants of slaves, remain poor 150 years after slavery was abolished, are problems that need to be solved.

We cannot control that some jobs have greater value than others. The cost of compensating everyone equally regardless of the value of what they do would be too high. Our immigration policies, as Mr. Leonhardt documents in his column, have adverse consequences for income inequality, are things we can control, and the costs of the changes being proposed are acceptable. We should not be deterred from making the changes to our immigration policies needed for the 21st century because some racists would embrace them or because it requires someone who doesn’t mind if he’s called a racist even to propose them.